Why Women Don’t Report
Author: Jennifer K. Crittenden, Special for USABR
With all the news about Bill Cosby and Brett Kavanaugh right now, a lot of guys are asking, “Why didn’t she… report it then? tell somebody?” Or even, “fight back? say no?” It’s reasonable to be asking those questions because victims of sexual misconduct don’t appear to have acted in their own self-interest which makes us wonder what’s going on. We think about how we would behave—or hope we’d behave—and things don’t match up. With my own share of bad experiences and as the author of two books about men and women working together, I’ll give you some food for thought.
First off, traumatized women and children often blame themselves. They think they must have done something wrong for this bad thing to have happened to them. Children worry that they’ll get into trouble, and women think they must have provoked the guy or sent the wrong message. It’s easy to overthink the situation and scold yourself for the circumstances: you shouldn’t have been out on the street right then; you shouldn’t have been so friendly; you should have been more careful with your drink; you shouldn’t have had a drink. We beat ourselves up because we know that’s what someone else will be thinking if we tell anybody.
The next thing people think about is whether anyone will believe them. If there were no witnesses, and the attacker is a powerful, popular guy, the answer may be no. Lots of predators are charming on the outside until they rip off their masks in private. If no one is likely to believe you, why would you go through the miserable experience of telling an authority figure or even a friend? It’s embarrassing and humiliating to talk about sexual stuff that happened in private. It makes you feel dirty, and you have to relive the horrible experience all over again.
Wanting everything to just be okay is an enormous motivator to keep quiet. Children hope it won’t happen again, and women want their lives to go back to normal. Sadly, often it does happen again, and their lives will never go back to normal. Victims suffer life-long trauma from having been abused or attacked. They don’t know that at first and think they will get over it. As time passes, even decades, they finally realize that they are never going to recover, and that can make them very angry and finally courageous enough to speak up.
That brings us to retaliation, a real risk when a powerful man is accused of something scandalous. The man and his allies, friends and families of the victim, and, if the man is well-known, even the public are all standing by to jump up and tell her she’s got it wrong, that she brought it on herself, and to question her motivation in bringing it up. Children and women who are in a weaker position than the abuser know this intuitively. If they raise the ire of someone in a position to hurt them, he can do a lot of damage—to their situation, their career, even their survival. So they keep quiet. Laborers don’t report their farm boss, kids don’t tell on their adult relative, actresses don’t talk about casting director, and subordinates don’t out the CEO.
When you start talking to victims and thinking about all that’s going on in these situations, you can come up with many good reasons that people keep quiet, including ones I haven’t included here. From feeling complicit, to not wanting to make trouble, out of fear of losing a paycheck or an opportunity or your life or a loved one’s life, to embarrassment and worries about whether or not you’ll be believed, the reasons to keep quiet can be much stronger than the push or need to report. It appears that over time some of that fear decreases, when the man doesn’t have the same power that he used to, the victims have gotten braver or angrier, or when they feel they simply can’t keep quiet anymore if other people are at risk. These situations are complicated, and I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t sometimes mitigating factors, but I wouldn’t want us to dismiss a somebody’s accusations out of hand just because we don’t understand why she or he didn’t speak out way back when.
What do you think? I have written a new book called What’s a Guy to Do? How to Work with Women. It’s about building a culture which welcomes women so that women will join the company, flourish, and stay while so many others drop out. It’s short, straightforward, and humorous. I encourage you to pick up a copy, and then let’s make this the beginning of the discussion. Please share your experiences and observations with me at my website discreetguide.com. We need everyone to work on the issues around workplace culture so everyone feels safe and comfortable at work. I’d love to hear from you.
